Cross-project defect prediction (CPDP) aims to predict software defects in a target project domain by leveraging information from different source project domains, allowing testers to identify defective modules quickly. However, CPDP models often underperform due to different data distributions between source and target domains, class imbalances, and the presence of noisy and irrelevant instances in both source and target projects. Additionally, standard features often fail to capture sufficient semantic and contextual information from the source project, leading to poor prediction performance in the target project. To address these challenges, this research proposes Smote Correlation and Attention Gated recurrent unit based Long Short-Term Memory optimization (SCAG-LSTM), which first employs a novel hybrid technique that extends the synthetic minority over-sampling technique (SMOTE) with edited nearest neighbors (ENN) to rebalance class distributions and mitigate the issues caused by noisy and irrelevant instances in both source and target domains. Furthermore, correlation-based feature selection (CFS) with best-first search (BFS) is utilized to identify and select the most important features, aiming to reduce the differences in data distribution among projects. Additionally, SCAG-LSTM integrates bidirectional gated recurrent unit (Bi-GRU) and bidirectional long short-term memory (Bi-LSTM) networks to enhance the effectiveness of the long short-term memory (LSTM) model. These components efficiently capture semantic and contextual information as well as dependencies within the data, leading to more accurate predictions. Moreover, an attention mechanism is incorporated into the model to focus on key features, further improving prediction performance. Experiments are conducted on apache_lucene, equinox, eclipse_jdt_core, eclipse_pde_ui, and mylyn (AEEEM) and predictor models in software engineering (PROMISE) datasets and compared with active learning-based method (ALTRA), multi-source-based cross-project defect prediction method (MSCPDP), the two-phase feature importance amplification method (TFIA) on AEEEM and the two-phase transfer learning method (TPTL), domain adaptive kernel twin support vector machines method (DA-KTSVMO), and generative adversarial long-short term memory neural networks method (GB-CPDP) on PROMISE datasets. The results demonstrate that the proposed SCAG-LSTM model enhances the baseline models by 33.03%, 29.15% and 1.48% in terms of F1- measure and by 16.32%, 34.41% and 3.59% in terms of Area Under the Curve (AUC) on the AEEEM dataset, while on the PROMISE dataset it enhances the baseline models’ F1- measure by 42.60%, 32.00% and 25.10% and AUC by 34.90%, 27.80% and 12.96%. These findings suggest that the proposed model exhibits strong predictive performance.
